Paul Finebaum has spent nearly 50 years building a career he never planned for, and on Wednesday, hours before receiving the Sports Media Lifetime Achievement Award at the Barrett Media Audio Summit, he detailed why he came close to leaving it all behind for a U.S. Senate campaign.
The opportunity arrived last August, when Tommy Tuberville decided to leave his Alabama Senate seat to run for governor. Finebaum wasn’t looking for a way into politics. He’d built four decades of radio and television work around college football, and specifically around being the “Mouth of the South.” But according to Finebaum, the people encouraging him to run weren’t vague about his chances.
“That was a tug of war. I’ve lived a long time, but it was the biggest challenge I’ve ever had professionally. I didn’t go looking for it; it came to me,” Finebaum said. “They told me they thought I could win. Then they told me not only do they think I could win, they know I could win. It’s tempting when someone tells you they have the money and the support to put behind you to be a United States Senator. It’s very tempting.”
Finebaum first raised the idea of a run in a September interview with Clay Travis, citing the assassination of Charlie Kirk as the moment that pushed him toward considering it. Within a week, Travis was reporting that ESPN had pulled Finebaum from his usual rotation of appearances in response, a claim the network’s Bill Hofheimer called “TOTALLY FALSE.” Finebaum’s SportsCenter and Get Up hits thinned out that week regardless. He spent the rest of the college football seasonpublicly quiet on where he stood before announcing in December that he would not run.
“Ultimately, the reason I couldn’t do it is because that’s not me,” he said. “I can’t get up there and mimic a talking point that I don’t believe, and I believe to be patently false. That’s exactly what you have to do. I spent enough time around the political advisors telling me what I have to say. What I can’t say and how many times I have to say this and that. Win or lose, and I do believe we would have won. I would have sold my soul and given up something I worked hard to ascertain for what.”
He gave a related account of the same decision to CBS News’ Major Garrett back in December, telling Garrett that operatives had advised him the clearest path to winning the Republican primary was to run against “woke Disney,” ESPN’s parent company, and that he couldn’t do that to the network that had employed him for 13 years.
“There was a time in this country when it really would have been enjoyable. You could be collegial and work with others across the aisle. But today, the stuff that is said every single day is insane. That’s not right or left, it’s both,” Finebaum said. “After you go through this, you realize how bad it is. I still feel I could add something to society, but it won’t be as an elected official.”
Finebaum is 70 years old and remains the longest-tenured face of SEC Nation, a program he’s carried since ESPN launched the SEC Network in 2014.
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